Sally Field Shares Details from Her Controlling Relationship with Burt Reynolds

Sally Field is revealing more about her onetime relationship with the late Burt Reynolds in her new memoir, In Pieces. In the book, released Tuesday, Field describes the actor, whom she dated for several years beginning in 1977, after the pair met on the set of Smokey and the Bandit, as controlling and distant.

“By the time we met, the weight of his stardom had become a way for Burt to control everyone around him, and from the moment I walked through the door, it was a way to control me. We were a perfect match of flaws,” she wrote. “Blindly I fell into a rut that had long ago formed in my road, a pre-programmed behavior as if in some past I had pledged a soul-binding commitment to this man.”

“This would hurt him,” she said in the interview last week. “I felt glad that he wasn’t going to read it, he wasn’t going to be asked about it, and he wasn’t going to have to defend himself or lash out, which he probably would have.”

An earlier excerpt from Field’s book revealed that she had been molested by her stepfather during her childhood, a relationship she now says influenced the one she had with Reynolds years later.

She told The New York Times that her time with Reynolds was “confusing and complicated, and not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful to me.”

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